Every so often, Americans are presented with the opportunity to decide what kind of country they want the United States to be.With the two budgets that have been presented by Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican Chair of the House Budget Committee and President Obama, the two paths forward could not be any clearer.

While both budgets substantially reduce spending on programs for poor and moderate-income Americans, it is Chairman Ryan’s budget proposal that most aggressively slashes spending for the nation’s “safety net,” suggesting a country more like the one that existed during the Gilded Age of the 1880s, or in the early 1930s, before President Franklin Roosevelt’s historic “New Deal.”

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two-thirds of the cuts proposed in the Republican budget would harm low- and middle-income families. Some of the deepest spending cuts will be in areas such as jobs programs, infrastructure improvements, college scholarships, spending on education, and in the budget for environmental protection.

Most concerning to the many constituents back home who are voicing their opposition to the Ryan plan at congressional Town Hall meetings are the plan’s prescriptions to make Medicaid (the public health system for the poor) a block grant for states to administer, and in 10 years, to replace and privatize Medicare (the health system for seniors) with a totally new scheme where a tax credit or deduction would be provided to seniors who would then have to find and procure their own private insurance.

While everyone acknowledges that something serious needs to be done about health care inflation, the Republican plan does nothing about stopping rising health care costs; they simply put more of the burden on individuals and already over-burdened state governments. Rep. Ryan’s Republican budget actually envisions continuing deficits until the 2030s.

Particularly galling during the ongoing budget and deficit discussion has been having to listen to hypocritical Republicans put the entire blame for the $14 trillion national debt on the backs of Democrats. Just to jog your memory, it’s the Republican Party that has controlled Congress and the Presidency the majority of time over the last 40-plus years. Indeed, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who, by the end of his second term in the late 1990s, last left us a balanced budget.

Following Bill Clinton’s balanced budget, George W. Bush came along with tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthy, the expensive and unjustified Iraq war, and a new, unfunded prescription medicine benefit, all of which were paid for with borrowed Chinese money. With all their talk about the importance of cutting the deficit, the Republican Ryan budget plan only cuts $4.4 trillion from the deficit over ten years, still leaving deficits for many years to come.

While Obama’s safety net cuts aren’t as draconian as the Republicans’, and he still only cuts the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years, at least he understands that any answer to the budget deficit problem will not only require budgets cuts, but tax increases as well. Unlike the Ryan budget that gives more tax breaks for corporations and the rich, at a time of dangerously growing income inequality, the Obama budget would very reasonably allow the Bush tax cuts for couples making more than $250,000 expire. The result would simply put their marginal tax rate at the same place it was during those high economic growth years of the Clinton presidency.

Truthfully, neither Obama’s nor the Republican budget does what needs to be done regarding the deficit and the long-term challenges of rising health care costs and the entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But the Republican answer of simply dismantling these programs and putting additional burdens onto the elderly and the poor without adequate funding or resources is no answer to the deficit and will only widen the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us.

While you won’t read much about it in the corporate-owned media, the one budget that really would eliminate the deficit over 10 years, and in a humane fashion,is the “People’s Budget” recently put forward by the 84-member Congressional Progressive Caucus. Rather than pandering to corporations and continuing deficits for as long as the eye can see, the People’s Budget would balance the budget by increasing the top tax rate to 49 percent for millionaires and billionaires (less than it was during Eisenhower’s presidency) and cutting the bloated defense budget by responsibly ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and reducing military spending by $2.3 trillion over the next 10 years. There is no rational reason this country should spend more on its military than all its potential enemies combined, while maintaining in excess of a thousand bases in over 60 countries around the world.

As the untimely demise of so many empires that have preceded us shows, the recipe of over-spending on military adventurism and allowing a dangerous gap between the rich and poor to grow and fester is not the way to keep a nation intact.

Depending on which of the three budget approaches is chosen, we’ll learn whether our elected leaders believe the constitutional admonition to “promote the general welfare” means anything more than simply giving tax breaks to the rich and feeding the “military-industrial complex.”